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Posts tagged: Financial Services

Despite the proposed acquisition of Kofax by Lexmark, Kofax is going about business as usual with the recent announcement of a $2.4 million deal with a leading U.S. financial services firm. Just days ago, Kofax, a leading provider of smart process applications that simplify the business critical First Mile of information-intensive customer interactions, announced that an undisclosed leading U.S. bank has invested in Kofax TotalAgility to automate their banking operations including new customer onboarding, and loan application processing. Read more »

The Strategy Institute held its annual Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit in New York City on December 9th and 10th. Over the course of the two days, speakers, vendors, representatives, and attendees all met to discuss best practices, new digital marketing techniques, and experiences that have brought both successes and failures. A majority of discussions were about how financial services can better connect to customers through mobile, content marketing practices, and leveraging data in an effective way. Here are some of the key observations gained from our time there:Read more »

There are few industries left using marketing software than can now be labeled as transformative as a result of digital media – from retail to government, marketers within these vertical markets have taken the marketing software technologies offered by vendors to bring full digital experiences to their prospective customers. However, in industries where more importance is placed on securing sensitive customer information there are greater hurdles to overcome in offering prospective customers a truly valuable experience. One such vertical that is driving the transformation of marketing is the financial services industry. Research completed by InfoTrends in this market and a recent eBook published by the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit, show just how marketers in financial services are taking these roadblocks around data security and creating a digital experience for their customers.

Today, the major provisions of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (the CARD Act) takes effect in the United States. The ultimate goal of this law is transparency and clarity in terms and conditions. The likely result will be sweeping changes to how credit card issuers approach their marketing, advertising, and billing. What does this all mean for TransPromo? One long-standing hurdle to the implementation of TransPromo is the headache of document (and data) redesign. Credit card issuers were given a government-mandated opportunity to open up that data and begin a redesign process–however basic it may end up being. That said, multiple vendors and service providers have leapt at the opportunity. The general feeling from many of the companies these vendors are working with is that if they are going through a redesign anyway, what else can they do?

Some of this activity was already put into motion while ramping up for the Truth in Lending Act (Regulation Z), which took full effect on October 1, 2009. Similar to the CARD Act, the relevant portion of this law related to content and formatting changes that credit card billers needed to put in place.Â CreditCards.com has an interesting timeline that shows when various credit card legislation takes effect. Our expectation is that 2010 will reveal significant headway made for TransPromo in the credit card industry in the United States.

Alan Greenspan’s recent testimony to Congress was quite shocking to those of us that took to him like the demigod champion of successful laissez-faire capital markets. “Yes, I’ve found a flaw,” Greenspan explained. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” (The NY Times provides a good re-cap here.) Read more »

…Wall Street banks have become insatiable consumers of IT services and some of the fallen giants had built up formidable computational resources, which were viewed by their purchasers as virtually the only non-toxic assets that they possessed. According to specialist website Datacenterknowledge.com, Lehman Brothers’ two data centres were central to the deal in which Barclays paid $1.75bn to acquire most of Lehman’s North American operations. The data centres and Lehman’s headquarters building ‘accounted for $1.5bn of the deal’s value, with the British bank paying just $250m in cash for Lehman’s North American investment banking and capital markets businesses,’ it said.

The breakneck consolidation of the banking sector is going to have a major impact on industries that supply banks with IT products and services. Within institutions, the imperative will be to minimise avoidable turmoil in the infrastructure. That means, for example, planned upgrades to Vista suddenly become non-starters – which implies that the related purchase of higher-specification PCs may also be postponed. So the crash will affect Microsoft (which is refusing to reveal data about how many Vista licences have actually been activated) and hardware vendors such as Dell, Lenovo and HP.Read more »